Amanda Anisimova, Standing Her Ground
Anisimova's run at the Qatar Open, and the virtues of aggressive court position
Tennis, with its labyrinthine scoring system and demands on hand-eye coordination and physical fitness, comes across as a complex sport. At its essence though, the objective is straightforward: hit the ball in the court one more time than your opponent.
The ways to achieve that are multi-faceted, but also generally boil down to two styles:
Make your opponent miss (counterpunch/defense)
Hit it past your opponent (aggression/offense)
If we look at Style #2, we can simplify that down also into two further sub-styles off the baseline:
Stand as close to the baseline as possible to shorten your opponent’s reaction time
Hit the ball so hard that your opponent can’t get there even if they tried
Generally speaking, the two styles are not super compatible: people who hit hard need more time to set up their swings and also time their contact effectively, which means they would prefer to step a little further back to do all that. Likewise, people who don’t have knockout power can’t really afford to stand further back if they want to be aggressive, because their shots won’t travel fast enough to bother their opponents when they’re being hit from several meters behind the baseline.
Enter Amanda Anisimova, who pairs “blink and you’ll miss it” power off the baseline with a commitment to standing on or near the baseline at all times. When it works, as it did during her championship run in the Qatar Open, it is a spectacle of shotmaking and courage.
Having aggressive court positioning (in the context of a baseline exchange, being the person who is standing closer to the baseline), provides many benefits: it allows you to hit wider angles on the court to pull your opponents further away, you maximize the chance of making contact with the ball at a height that’s above the net so you can hit through the ball more aggressively rather than hitting it with a lot of spin, and you can potentially hit the ball before your opponent has had a chance to recover to their optimal position. Here’s an example of Anisimova (far side, in white) doing the latter against Marta Kostyuk (near side, in red):
After Kostyuk’s return hits the net tape and Anisimova slices it back to initiate a neutral rally, Kostyuk loops a forehand to Anisimova’s backhand (which is just as lethal as her forehand). Anisimova recognizes this and takes a step forward to hit her backhand, and already Kostyuk is in trouble:
When Anisimova hits her backhand and sends Kostyuk scrambling to slice a backhand back to the middle of the court, Anisimova wastes no time to come into roughly 3/4 court (between the service line and baseline) to hit a forehand and take even more time away. This shot eventually leads to an open court forehand that Anisimova puts away for a winner.
Anisimova’s power and her exceptional timing means that she frankly doesn’t have to think too hard about point construction. Once she’s on offense, she can just alternate corners and be confident in knowing that eventually her opponent will be too far out of position to make the next ball:
Here she plays almost an identical point, ripping a backhand return down the line, anticipating the cross-court backhand response, hitting her own backhand down the line, and then finding the open court with a blistering forehand.
Even in neutral and slightly defensive situations, and against somebody with similar firepower, Anisimova tries as hard as she can to maintain court position, moving laterally across the baseline to cut off attacks rather than moving backwards and conceding. In this point, in the final against fellow power baseliner Jelena Ostapenko (near side, in black), Anisimova steps back and concedes court position on only one shot (a backhand in the middle of the rally), before immediately stepping up to the baseline on the next shot. Ostapenko, by contrast, is gradually pushed further and further back during the point (on one shot she is standing on the “Qatar” text on the court). This puts a lot of pressure on Ostapenko to either hit hard enough to back Anisimova off, or with enough width to force Anisimova to hit a weak shot (which is hard to do when you’re further back behind the baseline). Eventually Ostapenko is able to win the point, but off of an exceptional forehand that she hits on the run (read: probably not a shot she can make consistently):
The clearest manifestation of Anisimova’s high-wire style comes on the return of serve, particularly off the second serve. She never passes up a chance to go on offense, and when returning second serves she is usually standing right on the baseline and moving forward. Off the first serve, she’s standing further back, but still taking full swings to try and catch the server off guard. Her exceptional groundstrokes and directional control means that she is capable of hitting winners of the return off both her forehand and backhand, from the Deuce or Ad court, and cross court or down the line:
Anisimova’s playing style is not without disadvantages: she makes a lot of errors, particularly off of her forehand side which is the more erratic of the two wings. Against Ostapenko, Anisimova had a positive Winners to Unforced Errors differential (26 to 11, +15), but against Kostyuk in the Quarterfinals, the differential was -15 (40 winners to 55 Unforced Errors). Even in her relatively trouble-free 6:3 6:0 win against Leylah Fernandez, she had a negative differential (-6, 11W/17UFE).
Anisimova’s shot selection often looks like she’s playing on a razor’s edge, and it is clearly her preference to end the point on her racquet, be it a winner or an error. In a tennis world that is trending towards more power, Anisimova is certainly part of that wave; what’s astonishing is that she does it with the court positioning of somebody with substantially less power, who has no choice but to stand closer for fear of being blown off the court. Anisimova has a choice, and it produces an explosive, sometimes nerve-racking, “how does someone do that?” brand of tennis that I hope stays on the tour for a very long time.